High-speed rail targeted for derail

Sacramento  “My goal,” Assemblywoman Diane Harkey (R-Dana Point) tells me, “is to ensure that we do not rip through the Central Valley, uprooting prime agricultural land, families, businesses, water infrastructure and a way of life for 100 miles of track just to say we started high speed rail.”

Harkey is, of course, referring to the state’s beleaguered fast-train project that, so far, has survived numerous bipartisan and independent challenges from local, state, and even federal officials. Yet if anyone can stop California HSR in its tracks, it’s the determined Harkey, who lately has led the charge on behalf of fiscal conservatives everywhere fed up with the lunacy of high-speed rail.

With more than 30 years of banking and finance experience and an economics degree from UC Irvine, Assemblywoman Harkey, whose district stretches from southern Orange County to the San Diego County border, is no stranger to both promising projects and dangerous boondoggles. And as the vice chair of the Assembly Appropriations Committee, Harkey strives against the odds (one might say, tilts at windmills) to provide a modicum of fiscal sanity here in the state capital.

Specifically, Harkey has engineered an effort by her fellow Assembly Republicans to push for an audit of the Authority’s “oversight and management of private contractors for the initial 29-mile segment between Madera and Fresno” – the so-called “route to nowhere.” Earlier audits, as I’ve discussed in this space, found rail officials had made risky ridership assumptions, incomplete funding assessments, and cost estimates that were borderline laughable.

In a letter last month to State Auditor Elaine Howle, Harkey and company wrote that they want to ensure “that the Authority has proper policies, protocols, and resources in place to manage its contractors,” preconditions they deem “critical for protecting passenger safety and controlling costs.” Their letter raised dozens of questions pertaining to oversight, safety, land expropriation, and potential conflicts of interest.

“The legislature needs to remain involved,” Harkey told me, “and be responsible for what is being proposed. And if we don’t have accurate ridership data we [should] reassess.” Referring to the seed money provided by the federal government as “cocaine for the train,” Harkey says we should “either return the $3.3 billion... or use our big state influence to swap the money for other infrastructure needs.”

Those needs, as North County residents well know, are abundant. “Eight billion dollars, plus two billion in match funding, or what the legislature approved last year for five years [of high-speed rail funding] with no oversight,” Harkey notes, “would go a long way in San Diego, Orange County, Riverside, or anywhere to improve rail, streets, highways, bridges, and Highway 99, which is in dire need of repair in the Central Valley.” Far from the pie-in-the-sky, decades-off promises of retro-futuristic railroad work, Harkey argues, “we have shovel-ready jobs now.”

And sure enough, in response to the audit request letter, Auditor Howle agreed to undertake a detailed, 11-pronged review of the initial segment, including reviewing the contracts in place and determining “whether the Authority’s projected costs and timelines for [the segment] are in line with the current business plan” and evaluating “how the Authority oversees, inspects, reviews, and approves the work of its contractors and assess[ing] the management controls in place to determine whether the controls are comparable to industry practices.”